In Paris, it was very easy to make friends with the Poles who were there, because they kept in contact with one another. It so happened, that I met Artur Międzyrzecki in that circle of other friends and I learned that he was a poet and found out what he'd experienced during the war and how earlier he'd been exiled to Uzbekistan and this, his story made me like him but nothing more than that, there was no more to this than that, besides, he was married and I was involved in other matters so there was no question of forming a more intimate attachment. However, that did happen in Paris... in Warsaw in a most unexpected way namely, simply, I wasn't prepared for a new attachment but, somehow that's what happened and we got married. In '55, we had a daughter, Daniela, who has a strong personality. I have a great deal of respect for her. Later, we left her in America because she had started studying for a university degree and it would have been hard to have interrupted her studies. Besides, she was studying philosophy and to have come back to Poland to study Marxist philosophy wasn't to anyone's taste. So we left that poor child there, who was about 20 years old, without any means of support, but that was what she'd asked for herself. She had a grant which... she was still paying back years later since the Americans want their student grants to be repaid. Some grants are provided by foundations so those don't need to be repaid but this one was provided by the government.

So, yes, we worked a great deal but I have to say that we didn't always work for remote goals, meaning for example the writing of a complete book. Artur wrote a very interesting book then called Return to Sorrento which was very widely-read, and Diary of a Tent-Dweller [sic], which is a kind of situational joke showing the army from a less heroic side, and that was very popular, but he was primarily a poet and, like me, he wrote poetry but as you know, poetry is written occasionally not continually. I wouldn't say that we had financial worries but we were in difficulties for the whole time right until the last years of our lives. Towards the end of his life this wasn't the case but we had to support ourselves somehow, we didn't like the idea of taking up a position somewhere, even an editorial job and so Artur wrote a lot of feature articles, interior reviews as we called them, for publications. As for me, I earned money by being a roving reporter but only in Poland where I mainly went to places associated with culture. Later, a book came out called From Local Journeys in which I described all of these encounters which I had in Poland with folk art, and that kind of thing.

Born to a Polish father and a Russian mother, Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and author of children's books. She studied at the University of Warsaw, the Catholic University in Lublin and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Czesław Miłosz called her 'the grande dame of Polish poetry'. Julia Hartwig was one of the few poets in Poland who made masterly use of poetic prose. She translated poems by Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Cendrars and Supervielle, and published monographs on Apollinaire and Gerard de Nerval. She also translated from English, and published a large anthology of American poetry which she co-edited in 1992 with her late husband, the poet Artur Międzyrzecki.

Film director and documentary maker, Andrzej Wolski has made around 40 films since 1982 for French television, the BBC, TVP and other TV networks. He specializes in portraits and in historical films. Films that he has directed or written the screenplay for include Kultura, which he co-directed with Agnieszka Holland, and KOR which presents the history of the Worker’s Defence Committee as told by its members. Andrzej Wolski has received many awards for his work, including the UNESCO Grand Prix at the Festival du Film d’Art.